In collaboration with Morgan Stanley and with funding from ESRC.

As it embarks on its 40th anniversary year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies will present its annual Green Budget on 28 January 2009, in collaboration - for the fifth year running - with the economists and analysts of Morgan Stanley. The Green Budget will provide authoritative analysis of the formidable policy challenges confronting Alistair Darling as he prepares his second Budget. The economic and fiscal outlook has deteriorated dramatically in recent months. The economy is now in recession and the Government has been forced to take a significant stake in leading banks and offer loan guarantees to prevent weaknesses in the financial system from leading to a deeper and more prolonged downturn. The Government has also announced a controversial short-term fiscal stimulus package that has added to an already dramatic increase in forecasts for government borrowing and debt. Its fiscal rules have been temporarily jettisoned.

This set of circumstances creates huge challenges for fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy, both in the near term and further ahead. We will be analysing those policy challenges and their relationship with financial market conditions. We will examine how recent events affect the way in which Labour's management of the economy is likely to be judged by posterity and how the rapidly changing outlook will affect the Government's future decisions on spending, taxation and debt funding, with significant implications for UK equity and bond markets and for UK companies. IFS researchers will address the decisions on taxation, spending and fiscal management that confront the Government, while Morgan Stanley's UK economists, equity strategists and bond analysts will assess the current market situation and the outlook for the financial sector.

In one of the most extraordinary periods for economic management in living memory, the issues discussed in this year's Green Budget include:

• Developments in the public finances under Labour
• The fiscal cost of the credit crunch and the government's stimulus package
• The outlook for the economy
• The future of the government's fiscal policy framework
• Our forecasts for the public finances and the implications for the Budget
• How the government should best fund its increased borrowing needs
• The government's increased role in the financial sector
• The implications of the looming squeeze on public spending
• Whether VAT should be used to impart further fiscal stimulus and/or to raise revenue
• How the government might reform income tax and National Insurance rates
• The implications of planned changes to business taxes

Speakers include: Robert Chote (Director, IFS), David Miles (Chief UK Economist, Morgan Stanley), Carl Emmerson (Deputy Director, IFS) and Laurence Mutkin (Fixed Income Strategist, Morgan Stanley).

Places at this conference are limited. To reserve your place, please email Bonnie Brimstone with the names, organisation and contact details of each delegate.

The Green Budget Report will be sent to IFS members and will be available to delegates at this conference.